Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Festive tidings, everyone. Things have been quiet round here as we've been slayed by the various winter viruses doing the rounds. But here he is, in a cheerful santa suit, the likes of which wont be available when the credit is really crunched. Enjoy those pointless dress-up-the-baby-novelty-purchases-and-the-like while you can, and I hope you have a good festive break.

If you're feeling really cheery, I've been involved in doing some fundraising for the baby unit at the Lister Hospital, Stevenage, and if you're looking for a xmas charidee to give a donation to, then here you go.

Paul did most of the research, I just helped him polish and polish and buff and polish it into good shape. A fun project for me to be involved in - and an interesting read about the issues regarding preserving our gaming heritage.

Saturday, 29 November 2008

Well, I know a good few of you read this blog, so here is another project of mine for further down the line. If any readers are working on relevant research, do get in touch.Call for Papers: Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture

Editors Brent Nelson (University of Saskatchewan) and Melissa Terras(University College London) invite submissions for a collection ofessays on “Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture” tobe published in the New Technologies in Medieval and RenaissanceStudies Series edited by Ray Siemens and William Bowen.

This collection of essays will build on the accomplishments of recentscholarship on materiality by bringing together innovative researchon the theory and praxis of digitizing material cultures from roughly500 A.D. to 1700 A.D. Scholars of the medieval and early modernperiods have begun to pay more attention to the material world notonly as a means of cultural experience, but also as a shapinginfluence upon culture and society, looking at the world of materialobjects as both an area of study and a rich source of evidence forinterpreting the past. Digital media enable new ways of evoking,representing, recovering, and simulating these materials innon-traditional, non-textual (or para-textual) ways and present newpossibilities for recuperating and accumulating material from acrossvast distances and time, enabling both preservation and comparativeanalysis that is otherwise impossible or impractical. Digitalmediation also poses practical and theoretical challenges, bothlogistical (such as gaining access to materials) and intellectual(for example, the relationship between text and object). This volumeof essays will promote the deployment of digital technologies to thestudy of material culture by bringing together expertise garneredfrom complete and current digital projects, while looking forward tonew possibilities for digital applications; it will both take stockof the current state of theory and practice and advance newdevelopments in digitization of material culture. The editors welcomesubmissions from all disciplines on any research that addresses theuse of digital means for representing and investigating materialculture as expressed in such diverse areas as:

We welcome approaches that are practical and/or theoretical, generalin application or particular and project-based. Submissions shouldpresent fresh advances in methodologies and applications of digitaltechnologies, including but not limited to:

• the value of inter-disciplinarity (as between technical andhumanist experts)• relationships between image and object; object and text; text and image• the metadata of material culture• curatorial and archival practice• mediating the material object and its textual representations• imaging and data gathering (databases and textbases)• the relationship between the abstract and the material text• haptic, visual, and auditory simulation• tools and techniques for paleographic analysis

Enquiries and proposals should be sent to brent.nelson[at]usask.ca by10 January 2009. Complete essays of 5,000-6,000 words in length willbe due on 1 May 2009.

The wierd thing about this is that the majority of people were searching for "mona lisa". (Andy Warhol famously commented, when the Mona Lisa visited New York in the 1960s, that they should have just sent a facsimile. And it seems that nowadays, that's what the Internet is delivering, and what people want to see).

It seems to reveal something about how people use digital libraries and archives. Woohoo, lots of stuff has been digitised! great! What shall we look up first? Erm..... dunno.... think of something famous that we already probably know....

As part of the LAIRAH research project, we demonstrated that some subjects were the most popular - or most requested - in digitised resources and collections. The Census, witchcraft, suffragettes, shakespeare, chaucer, WWI, WWII... I guess we can now add "Mona Lisa" to that list.

Questions. How many people wont ever come back to this website once it relaunches, given the 404? and really, how exciting is the entry on the Mona Lisa?

Thursday, 20 November 2008

There seems to be a raft of new ways to customise bags/wallpaper/think-of-a-flat-surface-you-can-stick-a-digital-image-on with your own pictures at the moment. But the one that really made me go.... "wow" is Spoonflower: print custom designed fabric on demand. Now, let me just get that sewing machine out....

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

One of the great things about being in academia is the aspect of working from home, as often as you like/can. However, recently my office has just been taken over with all manner of small person's stuff, cot, etc. Where's a person to keep her books? ...Well, I'm excited to report I've just ordered a "home office" to be built at the bottom of the garden, aka "my shed". In a few weeks I'll be able to disappear off, and me and the gnomes can hang out in peace... Next up, figuring out how to make our wifi reach all the way down there.

Chinese doctors released the country's first diagnostic definition of Internet addiction over the weekend, amid efforts to address an increasing number of psychological problems that reportedly result from Internet overuse.

Friday, 24 October 2008

Over the last year or so, I've been working with Greg Crane, of the Perseus Project, on a special issue of DHQ in honour of Ross Scaife. Its going to be an impressive and hefty volume - 10 very good papers, plus detailed intro and conclusion - about "where classics will be in 2018". A potentially important roundup of the issues currently being raised about the use of information technology in classics.

We're working like daemons to get try and get the issue up by the TEI meeting in London at the start of November. If not completely finished by then, it wont be long behind. I'm really looking forward to seeing this issue up - its a very fine testament to Ross Scaife's legacy.

Friday, 17 October 2008

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index. Published by "Manhattan House" and sold by "Metro Publications", both of New York, its "Five Volumes in One" was pure hype: it had never been released in any other form.

Advertised as "World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs" and marketed mainly to overheated adolescents (see the 1942 Keen ad, left), it consists of nothing but photos and captions with no further exposition.

Good example of the type of quirky digital edition only a keen amateur would put together. And what a strange imperialistic text....

We all have our set of "essential" websites we have to check first thing in the morning. Depending what mood I'm in, I'll have a sneaky peek at fffound, or http://www.booooooom.com/, (or etsy, if I'm in the mood for shopping), to see what the "creatives" are up to these days. I was particularly taken by this work by Nicolas Burrows. Sums up how I've started the day for the past 15? years...

Friday, 3 October 2008

Monday, 29 September 2008

In the Spring, we invested in a decent Digital SLR. Ironically, I was too busy to get to grips with it, given I was working all hours (on top of the day job) to finish the book on Digital Images before the arrival of The Wee Man. Now, I'm enjoying having the time - and a captive subject to play with - to experiment with it a little.

Photography and children go hand in hand. Susan Sontag said

Cameras go with family life. Not to take pictures of one’s children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference… Those ghostly traces, photography, supply the presence of dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family (Sontag 1979, On Photography, p. 8-9).

A child born today will probably have more photographs taken of them in the first year than a child born 50 years ago would have had in their lifetime, given the affordances of point-and-click digital cameras. The silent problem, though, is that folks are so lackadaisical in their approach to long term maintenance of personal digital image collections, that most of these digital images will not be around in 50 years time. Discuss.

"Official" photography of babies is still big business, even in the digital era. In the UK, a few hours after giving birth, you are accosted by the "Bounty Lady", sponsored by the government and industry, to provide you with all the forms you need to register the birth, sign up for child support benefit, and get your hands on child trust fund money. In return for all your details, you also get a bag full of samples of pampers and fairy liquid and the enviromentally-unsound like (and research shows that folk tend to stick with the brands they are presented with when their baby is first born. Kerching!). Then the Bounty Lady sticks a Digital camera in your baby's face (oooh, fancy), and for the bargain price of only £30 or so you can have a Digital print of your wee lamb. At least, I think that was the cost of the smallest package - I was still out of it, having been awake for 3 days by that point.

We smiled smugly and pointed out our range of digital cameras and camcorders which we had with us, and neglected to pay the inflated fee for the snapshot. (You'll have to be my friend on facebook to see such video classics as "Thumper throws shapes" and "Rhythm is a Dancing Baby".) Every single other new mother on the ward stumped up for the costly point and click snap.

In a few weeks, the Bounty Lady (or other commercial equivalent) is turning up to mother and baby group, again, to take a snapshot of all the babies, and charge inflated prices for photo-printed tat just in time for xmas. I'm tempted to take along the DSLR and practice my photography skills with other folk's kids for free. Then they can trot down to the interweb and get whatever they want printed up themselves at normal prices. But maybe that's not the way to win any new friends (or get a free pack of environmentally-unsound pampers). Just say cheese like everyone else...

... I've added the newfangled Blogger tool, "Following", so folk can say whether they read this blog... not sure I'll keep it up there yet. If no-one signs up, I guess I'll take it down. If too many people sign up that it gives me the fear, maybe I'll take it down.... :-)I really should just enable google analytics on this blog and have done (although I dont know why, given that google owns blogger, that they cant let you switch on analytics automatically without grubbing around in the source code yourself).

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

I just watched a fascinating documentary called "The Mona Lisa Curse", by the art critic Robert Hughes. A very personal polemic about how the financial markets now own - and ruin - what we call "art", by treating it as a commodity and ignoring the underlying artistic statements, comments, and visions inherent in the work. Art is stripped down to a series of icons which now change hands again and again for exorbitant sums of money. (You can still watch this online for a few days, if you have a spare hour its worth taking a look, if just to see all the footage of the NYC art world in the 60s, and Hughes' telling off of the modern collectors who have no idea about what art is, beyond its financial value).

What has this got to do with digital humanities? Hughes traces the phenomenon of art as commodity to a world tour made by the Mona Lisa in the 1960s. I quote from the documentary

over a million americans filed past it... I had this premonition.... it managed to turn the mona lisa into a kind of 15th century television set....in 1963, in new york, the mona lisa was now treated like a photo in a magazine, to be quickly scanned and then discarded. When Andy Warhol heard that the painting was coming to new york, he quipped "why dont they just have someone copy it and send the copy? no-one would know the difference". The work I had once so admired conjured up a nightmarish vision of the future of art. With swarms of passive art imbibers lining up to be processed by therapeutic culture shots. This glimpse into the future saw something quite real: the orgy of consumption that would tear open the art scene...

The documentary is about finances, and how money has ruined the art world. It didnt touch on modern media, really. But I wonder about this idea of reproduction and facsimile, about image and reproduction. How is digitisation any different? Is it a good thing to divorce the fetishisation of the material object from the "icon" it represents? We are now merrily creating and disseminating Warhol's copies of masterpieces (and apprenticeship-pieces) via imaging and network technologies. How are these used? what evidence is there that this furthers research and study? Are we just feeding Hughes' "passive art imbibers" via new media?

Friday, 19 September 2008

... is now online, here. Which should save you the £90.25 it currently is going for on Amazon for a physical copy! Well worth a read through to get an overview of how computers have been used to aid in the study and analysis of literature over the past 40? odd years.

Thursday, 18 September 2008

(Those of you who know me will know its the first time I've really been out and about for about 5 months - given I've been learning to walk again - and I was pleased to be able to hobble about without even crutches for a few hours, inbetween being dropped off and picked up at the door. (Thanks, Os.) It was great to chew the fat/ shoot the breeze / smoke the peace pipe with some friends and colleagues over a coffee or two, and to see a few papers. (Thanks to Claire Warwick who gave the VERA paper, given my head is still a little addled). A nice intro back into academia. I'm not actually back from maternity leave until April, but I dont think you can really switch your brain off entirely for that long - and I have no plans to!).

But while it was grand for me on a personal level, I noticed the conference was a little.... quiet. Tumbleweedy. Some of the usual suspects weren't there, and there didnt seem to be too many non-usual suspects filling up the numbers - the attendance at the couple of sessions I went to was relatively poor. I wonder whether I hit the conference at a lull, or is this says something about the tides of our subject? Is it usual wax and wane, or are people moving onto other conferences, other topic matters, other more subject-based meetings?

I've argued before that digital humanities will be a true success when the technologies are just integrated into usual working practices within the various domains in the humanities, and there will be no need for conferences about "using computers" as people will just be using computers in the humanities, without a big hoopla. There should come a time where conferences on, say, English Lit or History will welcome those using computational methods as bona fide scholars. Is that where we are already? I suspect not yet. But DRHA felt a long way from the heady days of, say, Sheffield 2000 or Glasgow 98, which both had a large attendance, and a real buzz about the subject.

Friday, 5 September 2008

... for Darkroom's new album, Some Of These Numbers Mean Something. "9 tracks of guitary synthy goodness". Nothing like some guitary electronica on a friday afternoon. (Not that I am married to one half of darkroom, or anything.....)

Friday, 29 August 2008

A range of images and objects have been selected by Hayward Curatorial Associate Tom Morton and purchased from the auction site eBay.co.uk over a two-week period in August 2008. The chosen pieces reflect Britain's 'hidden' art - works that have occupied people's homes rather than the public space of a gallery, offered for sale through the democratic marketplace of the internet. View Basket comprises everything from Victorian paintings to original comic art, from customised action figures to ephemera by leading art world figures. An ever-expanding selection of works fill the gallery as new items arrive during the run of the exhibition, reflecting the project's open-ended nature. It also includes a display of the improvised and sometimes highly idiosyncratic packaging in which these items have been sent to The Hayward. When the exhibition ends the works will become part of The Hayward's archive.

Genius. Hope to get to go and see it. We have quite a collection of artworks adorning our walls from ebay - its a great place to get unusual prints for cheap. (I'd tell you the name of my favourite dealer, but you may bid the prices up....)

Thursday, 28 August 2008

... I'm dealing with my book proofs at the moment. I have a couple of weeks to turn them around.

Which would be entirely not-a-stress, if some helpful copy-editor hadnt gone through and changed the grammar at least once on every page, to "fix" sentences until they dont make sense. And I'm having to keep an eye out for those, as well as my own typos.

They've put "the" in front of everything, for some the wierd the reason.

For example:

Original text: 40,000 books from Harvard will be digitized.

"Corrected" version: The 40,000 books from the Harvard will be digitized.

Tuesday, 26 August 2008

... is now available to try out online, and you can upload and create your own multi-photo walk-through panoramas (providing you are signed up to Windows Live). See http://photosynth.net/ . It really is the future of pulling together tagged-image content into a usable whole...

Tuesday, 19 August 2008

A great presentation from TED about Photosynth, a new system to look at digital images, which merges photos and builds VR models on the fly from underlying image data - such as all the pics on Flickr labelled with one tag. Really worth scrolling through to about 4mins in, seeing the demo with Notre Dam.

The Urban Dictionary is a fascinating example of the whole web 2.0 caboodle - a dictionary of american slang written by "you". Its handy when decoding some comments left on blogs (such as gr7, rotflmao, lulz) or figuring out what the titles of British romcoms are actually referring to (I wont link to examples here, as they are invariably dubious activities of a sexual nature).

But then you see the definition of real words, like, I dunno, "feminism". And we see the trolls emerge. Are all commonly used web 2.0 sites so sexist? Misogynistic? Abusive? In this brave new t'interweb world, my heart sinks (and blood boils) that the mirror is held up to society, and the same old same old often emerges.

I've really been enjoying the Olympics, especially the cycling (go team GB. I'm not remotely patriotic in any other sporting event, apart from the Olympics. The real McHoy, indeed). And the gymnastics (I always wonder why you would bother spending the time to make a clip to put up on youtube, and not bothering to spell check?)

Sunday, 17 August 2008

Friday, 1 August 2008

Ladybird books have just digitised lots of their children's books and put the illustrations online (following renewed interest in the illustrations over the last few years - they've become collectors items.) Naturally, you can buy prints, etc - but a fascinating collection of digitised material. Check out how the computer works...

Monday, 28 July 2008

http://www.cuil.com/ is a new search engine - set up by former google employees... one to watch. Claims to be the biggest on the web - lets see if Cuil (Irish word for knowledge, prounounced "cool") gives Google a run for its money.

Wednesday, 23 July 2008

... I'm loving this set of digitised pictures, courtesy of Cursive Buildings, which has taken stereograph pictures from New York Public Library and created simple animated gifs from them. This one shows a buffalo creating a stir in Chicago, circa 1890. More here. Original stereograph here.

Monday, 21 July 2008

Due to other house-bound duties (involving a small friend and nursery rhymes) I'm not able to go to the dig at sunny Silchester this year, to see how the VERA (Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology) project is coming along, but the Blog seems to suggest things are doing really well, with good uptake of digital pens and the like on site.

There's an open day on site on Wednesday 23rd July in case anyone fancies checking out what the project is trying to achieve:

To showcase the VERA project actually working on site! The excavation itself is probably the best place to show how the technology in the VERA project is actually being used. There will be the opportunity to see real life contexts being recorded and the data uploaded into the Integrated Archaeological Database.

More details here, if you feel like heading down to the dig. Weather forecast is sun! (have I just jinxed it?)

Sunday, 13 July 2008

Multicolr Search Lab have produced a nifty little app that lets you search through 3 million "interesting" Flickr images by colour. Fun to play with - and could be useful for those colour-themed lecture slides...

After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples. [link]

Ten years ago, I remember chatting to some of my historian chums who were undertaking doctoral research involving archival material. They would refer to it as "doing an archive": college would give them a small pot of cash, they would go somewhere for a couple of weeks and rout about an archive all hours of the day that they could, photocopying a huge stash of material, and getting boxes and boxes of facsimiles shipped back to read, analyse, and generally deal with later.

Five years or so ago, I remember researchers cackling with glee at the National Archives enlightened Digital Photography Policy: It became apparent that it was fine to take your own digital camera into TNA and create images of the documents that you needed. No scanners are allowed, for noise reasons. The reading rooms began to fill up with researchers undertaking their own mini-digitisation projects, effectively creating digital versions of material that TNA couldnt possibly digitise themself, due to issues of cost and time.

In the last couple of years, there have been some interesting developments in allowing individuals to share these resulting images, and knowledge, of archival material. Your Archives from TNA has been in beta for a while, providing a wiki based environment to allow users to submit their own material, or browse material posted by others, creating an expanding online resource. Footnote.com (a commercial, fee based website) combines original historical documents in a social networking environment, currently hosting 36.5 million images of historical documents online, submitted by the general public. Individual subscribers are encouraged to discuss, challenge, and share archival evidence.

A description of this shift towards large scale amateur digitisation, combined with social networking, was captured nicely in an article in last week's Boston Globe: Everyone's a Historian Now.

UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you were a historian and you wanted to write a fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II, research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for something new in the official combat reports.

Today, however, you might first do something very different: Get online and pull up any of the unofficial websites of the ships that participated in the battle - the USS Pennsylvania, for example, or the USS Washington. Lovingly maintained by former crew members and their descendants, these sites are sprawling, loosely organized repositories of photographs, personal recollections, transcribed log books, and miniature biographies of virtually every person who served on board the ship. Some of these sites even include contact information for surviving crew members and their relatives - perfect for tracking down new diaries, photographs, and letters.

Online gathering spots like these represent a potentially radical change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for decades, if not centuries. By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, "crowdsourcing," as it's increasingly called, may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single historian toiling in the dusty archives.

The interesting question will be: how and when will academic historians start to routinely utilise these resources? The lone scholar in the ivory tower now needs good broadband.

Monday, 2 June 2008

I have to say I'm making more use of Google Books and Google Scholar than I ever thought I would - usually as an adjunct search to the methodical, traditional, chase up references in articles and books and established, bonafide indexes. Sometimes just typing in a string of related words about what you are searching for brings up new and hitherto unreferenced articles on the subject (although you have to be careful about quality and provenance, obviously).

I've never used the Microsoft Book Search service, for no real reason other than I tend not to go near MSN search.

An article in last weeks NY Times claims that Microsoft is pulling out of its digitisation program, which was meant to rival Google Books and Google Scholar (MS has so far digitised 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles). It also leaves a lot of libraries in the lurch who, rather than go with the Google model of restricting search results, had chosen to be in league with Microsoft, and the Internet Archive:

Microsoft’s decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support. Several major libraries said that they had chosen to work with the Internet Archive rather than with Google, because of restrictions Google placed on the use of the new digital files.

Interesting times. Google marches forth, again. Back to the drawing board (begging tin) for some institutions.

Friday, 30 May 2008

Flickrvision plots, on a map of the world, where images have been loaded up to Flickr from. One picture appears every couple of seconds. Available as a flat map of the world (classic view), or a spinning 3D globe.

Wednesday, 28 May 2008

This week, we're working on the book cover (Digital Images for the Information Professional) and I needed some copyright free images to use. I had mocked up a cover for the publisher, which Ashgate liked, using images from Flickr available under a Creative Commons license, but its all round easier to use images you own yourself. So, since Husband was in London he kindly agreed to capture the last piece needed for a montage: a busy street scene (Oxford Street) filled with people. It will be tweaked and transformed, and most people wont be recognisable, but we needed the raw image.

Which led to an interesting discussion about photographing in public places, and photographing crowds of people (not least because of the people objecting to having a photographer standing in Oxford Street taking pictures of them. I do this myself when am featured in images, so cant complain).

On Boing Boing today, there was an interesting post about this. In the UK, there have been various concerns about the rights people have in taking pictures in public places (whereas we are the society under most surveillance from CCTV, etc). There was even a very popular petition on started on the Number 10 website about this, even though there are no real laws to stop people taking pictures at the moment. Current have produced a very interesting short documentary called "You cant picture this", by Opencircuit, about the current state of the law in taking pictures in public places: and the attitude of the police in the film demonstrates how misunderstood this area is. Well worth 6 minutes of your time.

Tuesday, 27 May 2008

Another way to explore online images. Tag Galaxy, built using the Flickr API, allows you to explore flickr tags in a solar-system type visualisation of different planets. An interesting student thesis project.

Monday, 19 May 2008

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

For various reasons (mostly involving crutches) I'm watching far too much news in the evenings at the moment. Which is why I found this video, from Pixelsurgeon, oddly compelling. Proof that sometimes, there is just no news...

Tuesday, 13 May 2008

Interesting rumblings in the digital humanities community about the University of Chicago's Project Bamboo: a Mellon funded, new project, described on their website:

a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?

Looks interesting. Read the proposal which sets out their aims and objectives. A lot of money for an 18 month project to discover, you know, how we can help those arts and humanities scholarly types actually use these darn computery digitally things, and provide some infrastructure to help them. (I'm particularly loving the line:

"is the state of arts and humanities technology akin to driving in the 1890s? For many in the humanities, computers are like horseless carriages of the late 19th century..."

This may be true for some, and its an interesting proposal to sort out What Needs To Be Done to aid scholars in using computational power and tools in their research. But there is very little evidence that they've done their homework to what efforts have gone into this before, and no mention of the digital humanities community/communities (such as ADHO, ALLC, ACH, SDH/SEMI, TEI) and the hundreds of scholars already treading this path or trying to deal with the concerns raised in the proposal. No mention of things like the Methods Network, or AHDS, or any other initiatives in this area (including evidence for success, and reasons for failure). Those listed on the proposal are not the scholars you would expect, who have been working on this for years. There is no real mention on users, use, and usefulness - you can ask a bunch of academics what they *need* or *want* till they are blue in the face, but actually what they will use is generally different.

Which is not to say that this project wont come up with some interesting, and useful findings. It may very well jolt us out of our cosy digital humanities burrow, so its a case of watch this space. But its the first many of us have heard about it, and for many reasons, the words "wheel" and "reinvent" come to mind. But I'm willing to be proved wrong on that one.

Another addition to the growing amount of genealogical material appearing online - the Origins Network have recently published an index of 28,000 wills from Surrey, England, from the 15th to the 19th Centuries.

An interesting if rather hyperbolic overview appeared in the Guardian, yesterday:

A vivid snapshot of social history, the wills show the importance of small items in less plentiful times: hay, kettles, blankets, butter, bacon, grain and livestock are commonly treasured things passed on to relatives and friends. Everything from a "pair of old stockings" to "gold bodkins" is given away, although wealthier folk list luxuries such as sweetwood boxes and "my best beaver hat". [link]

(The article failed to stress that you had to subscribe (ie pay) to access them. Genealogy is big business, remember). Still, a very interesting collection - and worth a look at the overview to see the range of material available, and free access to some sample highlights which manage to capture some snapshots of thoughts and worries of the time.

Thursday, 1 May 2008

Interesting line up just announced for the summer lecture list of work in process papers in the Digital Classicist series. Worth trotting along to Senate House (London) for, of a friday afternoon.Very friendly crowd, and good discussions tend to follow.

Today's random digitised ephemera is from the "Vintage Patterns" pool on Flickr (which has 885 members, 4266 images, so is a pretty impressive archive based on community input).

One of the reasons I love Flickr is the way it encourages groups of interested individuals to pool images of their collections together - creating hundreds of micro online museums/archives, many of which provide detailed and sometimes exhaustive metadata about the type of items which normally go under the institutional radar.

I love not only the history of fashion element to the vintage patterns pool, but the history of graphic art and design.

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

...the book is submitted, and already in production. We're already designing the front cover, which is always fun. Before I go onto (or back to) other things, here's some interesting factoids about digital images:

There are more than 14 million digital images uploaded to Facebook every day [source]

The phrase "picture element" has been used to describe the individual points in a bitmap since 1927, and this wasnt shortened to pixel until 1965, using the popular abbreviation "pix" used by hollywood gossip columnists [source]

Images could be sent over telegraph in 1843 - only three or four years after the discovery of "photography" itself. There is a hidden history of electronic, and digital images, which stretches back as far as the invention of the film camera. But you'll have to buy the book to read up on that one.

Wednesday, 9 April 2008

... I finished a draft of the book! all 103,616 words of it. Then promptly went up to Scotland for a few days r+r. Good to see some snow and some real scenery.

Now I'm knee deep in formatting, before I send it to the publishers at the end of the month. It seems that for the bibliography, when citing online references, they want the date of original publication online, the date last updated, and the date I accessed it. *sigh*. The formatting guidelines are a few years old, from back when the web was spangly and new-ish and proper academics didnt really quote from online resources.

I have over 500 online references to check.... back down the salt (silicon?) mines, one last time....

Tuesday, 25 March 2008

... it's because I'm in the final stages of writing a book, Digital Images for the Information Professional, which will be going into press with Ashgate next month.

The last 5,000 words always seem to be the hardest. I hope to have a completed, proof read, ready to format, first draft by the end of next week. Its taken me a year to do, on top of the day job, and so far I'm very happy with how it has turned out. Just that one half-chapter to finish....

Tuesday, 18 March 2008

Ross Scaife, Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, passed away at the weekend, too young.

There's a thorough overview of his contribution to classics, and in particular, digital classics, over at Stoa.

I didnt know Ross terribly well, but whenever I did meet with him, he was always kind, generous, and overall: interested. I first corresponded with him as a Masters student, doing my MA thesis in Greek Art, and here was this professor on email willing to spend some time engaging with a foreign, unknown student they had never met. As a young scholar, whenever I bumped into him from then on at various conferences and symposiums, he was always pleased to see me, always curious, always supportive. His contribution to classics has been great - but I cannot stress enough how much I respected this approachable, kind, scholar, and how much such support meant to a young scholar figuring out how the digital could fit in with the classical.

An informative and amusing overview about the current flame wars happening regarding websites that dont function in IE8. Should browsers be backwards-compatible? Should web standards be adhered to? What is a web standard, anyway?

98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.

Wednesday, 5 March 2008

So, apparently, some wacky funsters incorporated a miniature museum into the Apollo 12 Moonlanding unit, so there is a museum of modern art on the moon. Who to believe? The joys of the interweb, keeping speculation alive.

Wednesday, 13 February 2008

Inbetween eBaying, I actually do some research. Yesterday headed over to Oxford for a meeting at the e-Science Research Centre about our "e-Science, Text and Technology" project, which just officially kicked off in January, so the new members of staff are hitting their stride now. Its a good team, and things are starting to move along now - hope to have something interesting to share at some point soon. The project runs for the next 3 years. No website yet - its on the to do list over the next few months.

The aim of the project is to provide computational tools to aid those in reading ancient texts, which are often damaged, abraded, and very difficult to read. We're developing image processing tools to aid in cleaning up "dirty" images, and to detect candidate handwriting strokes on difficult text, etc. We're also looking at decision maintenance systems, and how we can build a computational environment which will facilitate the reading of a document, and the documentation of that reading, so that those who come up with a reading can do so integrating the different linguistic and palaeographic datasets available, and keep a note of how and why they reached a certain interpretation. This is something which is crucially missing from the documentation of most readings of difficult texts.

Exciting stuff, huh? I'm now going to start looking at different palaeographic annotation tools which are available, so we can design our own with the best bits incorporated. (If anyone has any ideas regarding image markup tools for letter forms, or can point me to existing systems I dont know about already, do give me a shout).

Monday, 11 February 2008

...as an addendum to the post, below, about the change in feedback on ebay. I've just "sold" 50 things on ebay. It looks like 48 transactions are going fine. One person has already emailed to say "sorry, I just wanted to see how high the bidding went, and I dont have any money to pay for the item". The other is quibbling about how much it costs to send a (rare, collectable) vinyl record to Finland. Both wasting my time (charges were clearly stated). And guess which ones are getting negative feedback from me?

Now imagine a world where people are able to bid up your items just for fun - and you cant say anything when they dont pay up...

On another note, I took 20 albums to the post office today. Had an interesting conversation with Joan Behind the Counter about how eBay really was the saviour of the Post Office in the UK.

Wednesday, 6 February 2008

Online auction site eBay has said it plans to overhaul its feedback system and will ban sellers from leaving negative comments about buyers.

EBay said problems were occurring, and slowing down trade, when buyers left negative comments about sellers who then retaliated with their own views.

Yuhuh. Thats the whole point. Its not just sellers who can be difficult - buyers can renege, refuse to pay, claim items are damaged when they are not, and generally behave like rude, thoughtless people. When you come across a buyer like this, you want to warn the rest of those trading on ebay.

I'm mostly a buyer rather than a seller, and can count on one hand the amount of difficult purchases I have made over the past 5 years, but the feedback mechanism has ensured, until now, that both sides have a fair point. At present, I'm selling almost 50 items on ebay (what a fun weekend of sitting in front of a computer): as a seller I have the right to not sell to someone with poor, low, or negative feedback. I'm selling some rare and valuable things. From now on, should I just trust the market forces to protect me (I'm not a "trader" in the market sense)? Sometimes trade needs to be slowed, and for good reason.

Tuesday, 29 January 2008

Has anyone else noticed the trend for people to talk about "Digitalisation" rather than "Digitisation"? Over the past year, student essays, newspaper reports, andvariouswebsites have started using "Digitalisation" to mean the process of creating digital representation of analogue objects and media. Now, I know language shifts and changes, and to some extent, "Digitalisation" makes kinda sense - you are making something digital, right? And there is the whole digitisation/digitization argument, but lets not get into that. Instead, lets have a look at some definitions:

Digitisation: The process of creating digital files by scanning or otherwise converting analogue materials.The resulting digital copy, or digital surrogate, would then be classed as digital material and then subject to the same broad challenges involved in preserving access to it, as "born digital" materials. (From the Digital Preservation Coalition website).

Digitalisation: The administration of digitalis or one of its active constituents to a patient or an animal so that the required physiological changes occur in the body; also, the state of the body resulting from this. (From the Oxford English Dictionary).

So now you know. Spell carefully, my friends....

ps. Yes I know in the early 1960s digitalisation was also used to mean digitisation. But it settled down pretty quickly into digitisation.

pps. Yes, I know policing the interweb for spelling mistakes is a pointless task. I was only pointing out an observation...

Thursday, 24 January 2008

Something that's been intriguing me for a while is the encouragement from traditional news outlets, such as the BBC, CNN, ITV, etc for the general public to submit pictures of newsworthy items to them, via mobile phone or email.

News agencies actively solicit user generated content. You can find out how to submit your prize winning photo journalism, or just-happened-to-be-there shots, to the BBC, here. The short version is, email them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk, although beware, by submitting them you grant the BBC:

a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way that we want.

There are other ways to make money of Britney Spears shaving her head, should that be your want, if you find the stalking of innocent celebrities acceptable. But lets suppose that you just want to submit them to the BBC for all to see for free.

How popular is this service?

I wondered. So I asked the BBC (well, filed a Freedom of Information enquiry to their FOI office), and it goes something like this.

They dont keep stats on individual submitters, in case of data protection issues. But in general, on routine days, between 100 and 150 users will email or message in 150 to 250 images from around the globe. On days when something UK-wide happens, such as the snow flurries which covered the country on the 8th February 2007, thousands of users can contribute: in this case, the BBC received 7316 images in 24 hours.

Tuesday, 22 January 2008

Sometimes, when marking essays, you come across things noted by students that have completely passed you by (but shhhh, dont tell them that). An essay on the paperless office points me to a campaign run by the National Library of New Zealand at LIANZA Conference 2007: TRANZFORM - Te Tīnihanga (9-12 September) where they placed catalogue cardswhich said "In 2017 libraries will be...." in conference packs, and asked for responses from attendees. An interesting flickr set to explore. [link]

Thursday, 17 January 2008

Flickr have just announced a project called The Commons, which they describe as

Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections

A pilot project with the Library of Congress,

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

It will be interesting to see the range of tags and comments people take the time to put forward (but I'm not sure that comments like "neat train picture :)" are doing much for our understanding of LOC image collections!)

I'm writing a book chapter just now about personal digital image collections, and the rapidly changing (changed?) imaging environment we now utilise. I was reminded of this article by Tom Ang (a photographer and presenter who writes some very accessible introductory books to digital imaging) which featured in the guardian a couple of years ago, but still packs a punch.

In 1998, 67bn images were made worldwide. We know that because 3bn rolls of film were sold. It is impossible to be accurate, but with a world population of digital cameras exceeding a third of a billion on top of millions of film-using cameras still in use, it is likely that more pictures are taken every year than in the previous 160 years of photography put together. In addition to the other pollutions we have unleashed on ourselves, we may well have to thank digital photography for giving us image pollution.[link]

You have to love Worth1000.com (which is a daily image manipulation contest site)'s galleries. This one, "archaeological anomalies" sets out to provide the missing links between man and beast.... and the moon..... and disney... and apple...

About Melissa Terras

I'm the Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. I teach Digitisation, and my research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the humanities that would otherwise be impossible. My UCL webpage contains more information about publications and research projects. I also hang out at @melissaterras. This was my personal blog, and everything I said here was in a personal capacity - you can find my new blog over at melissaterras.org. I'm preserving this content to prevent bit rot, but its all replicated over the road, too - hope to see you there.